Hi,

as indicated in [1] I was pretty intrigued by the GPD Micro PC, and since I lately actually bought one, I thought I should share my impressions here.
As a preface: I'll be talking about a lot of "problems", but really, they are rather nitpicks that either have to be expected with a device like that or are easy to solve or to adjust to.

Being a FLOSS zealot, my first question was: Where do I buy it? There was no way I'd buy it with Windows preinstalled. Fortunately, DragonBox Shop (think: Pandora, hopefully Pyra) sells it with Ubuntu. [2]
The shop was restructured recently and some things still need to be worked out. For example, it wouldn't let me order anything without unblocking some Amazon URLs. I wasn't wiling to do that, so I contacted the shop owner directly, who was very accommodating in that regard. So, @EvilDragon, in case you read this: Thanks again!

Due to some unforeseen "real-world circumstances" the last weekend lent itself to spending it with the GPD instead of my usual 12" subnotebook.

While Ubuntu is ok from a technical POV, I'm a Debian user. So I wanted to bring Debian to the device. "Buster" having recently been released made that a lot easier (I think). As a first step I only wanted to try Debian from a USB stick without overwriting the pre-installed Ubuntu.
Here's the first problem I found: The UEFI has an option to switch between EFI and legacy boot. But the legacy option doesn't seem to be working. If you select that one and try to boot from a legacy MBR stick, you'll only get into a reboot loop that brings you back to the UEFI. So EFI boot seems to be the only option. Fortunately Secure Boot is off by default.

Next "problem": You might know that there is a portrait display built into the device. So the Debian text installer will run sideways. That's no big deal. What is a big deal however is, that the internal keyboard won't work in the installer. So have a USB keyboard at hand! That works fine. From now on the installation works flawlessly. Of course, the Free Debian installer doesn't include any wifi firmware, so either attach a network cable (yay, great device! ) or use the unofficial Debian installer with firmwares!

Once you boot the installed system you'll notice, that the display lights up but stays blank. That's because Buster's kernel is too old. Afaik, you need kernel 5.2 for the display to work properly. You can either build that yourself, or in case you're lazy (as I am), you can use towo's Siduction kernel [3] as a stopgap until kernel 5.2 or newer shows up in Debian (preferrably as a buster-backport). Since the device runs fine except for the display, you can just ssh into it and install a newer kernel.
If you use towo's kernel, you should be aware however, that Buster includes gcc-8 while towo's kernel is built with gcc-9. That's not a problem right now but it might break at any time in the future. For now you just need an equivs dummy [4] that provides gcc-9, and a link from gcc-8 to gcc-9. Otherwise dkms won't work (e.g. for building VirtualBox kernel modules).

Now that you have a working display again, you'll notice that it's still sideways. There's two places where you have to adress this:
1. The framebuffer:
The pre-installed Ubuntu has these two kernel parameters in its grub configuration:The 2nd one actually rotates the framebuffer. I didn't investigate on what the 1st one does, but it doesn't seem to hurt.
2. The X server:
The Ubuntu installation just rotates the display via xrandr. I've heard that costs performance, but it's the way I would have gone too. I'm using lightdm as a login manager and you can rotate the whole X session via the lightdm.conf:
That's it pretty much on the software side. with an up-to-date kernel and a rotated display everything else is just plain old Debian.
With Xfce based on a minimal installation the battery monitor shows just under 8 hours when the device is idle, wifi on and the display in one of the lower settings. Suspend2RAM works fine btw.


Now to the hardware. Obviously, with its 6" this device is tiny for laptop standards. It's right in the middle of my N900 and my Asuss EEE 901 and that's exactly how it feels like. I have pretty good eyes so the Xfce desktop is still comfortable with only a slight increase of the DPI value from 96 to 110.
The display is pretty bright, so the lower settings are sufficient indoors. It opens up to an angle of about 145°, which, with respect to its size, is just about right when using it like a regular laptop. Given that the GPD is made for thumb typing and I want to hold it like my N900, I'd wish it opened a little more.

Of course the keyboard feels cramped, but other than that it's pretty decent. I often found myself subconsciously either admiring or dreading it, depending on whether I had the N900 or the EEE 901 in mind for comparison. I think GPD has pretty much made the best of it given the circumstances. The power key feels wobbly, but all the other keys are rather on the stiff side of comfortable.
As a German I'm not that used to qwerty keyboards but the layout makes a lot of sense. Except for the "6" key I'm not searching for keys on it any more than I do on regular qwerty keyboards.
The keyboard is backlit, unfortunately the device doesn't remember over reboots whether it was on or off. It always starts with the backlight being on. The "on" setting works like on the N900: Once you press a key the keys light up and go dark after some seconds without input. I just wish, the touchpad buttons in the upper left corner were backlit too. The touchpad itself doesn't feel great but it's ok. My main gripe with it is, that it seems to scroll "backwards" by default. In the Apple world they call this "natural scroll". This setting can be reversed in Xfce, so it shouldn't be a big deal, but ironically it seems Xfce applications don't care for this setting, while e.g. Firefox does.

The fan seems to only have two settings: on and off and I'm not aware of a way to software-control it. It produces a high-pitched slightly whiny sound and occasionally I think there is a very slight bearing noise. Fortunately there is a hardware switch to turn it off completely and although we had somewhere around 35°C around here, the fan doesn't seem to be needed. CPU and SSD temperatures lebel out at about 55°C whel idle, while moderate tasks bring both up to 60°C. I haven't run any synthetic tests yet, but the highest CPU temperature I've seen so far were 70°C, which was when decoding a FullHD video in software.
(edit: These temperatures are with the pre-configured 10W TDP. In the UEFI you can also chose 6 or 8W.)

There are 3 USB 3.0 type A ports. They seem to be built slightly differently than usual. Specifically, they are a bit more narrow on the outer edge. That means that regular USB devices sit pretty tightly, but I also have a USB stick with a special design (see [5] for reference) that doesn't fit at all.
The charger uses USB C and is rated at 3A@5V, 2.67A@9V, 2A@12V. I only can say that the port actually charges because I have no other USB C devices. The cable is only 1m long, which is way too short I think. Getting a longer one (2m) will be my first upgrade.
There came a very thin sleeve in the box that's actually just a plastic bag. Finding a suitable (not too big) sleeve/bag (mainly to keep the ports free of dust) is the next task. Some photo camera bags look promising.

The case is all plastic, but like with the EEE PCs or even more so, due to the size, this is not a problem at all. Everything feels pretty sturdy. Actually, the "real world circumstances" I mentioned in the beginning involved a 30km bicycle tour through moderately heavy terrain, during which the GPD was in a frame bag fixed to my unsuspended bicycle.
I've seen a photo somewhere that suggested that the hinge is only fixed on one side. I tried to wiggle the display to see if it's unstable, but within reasonable amounts of force there was nothing.

The µSD slot is mounted upside down but works fine. The headphone jack works as well. I have no experience with serial port hardware, so I can't really test that one.
4k output via HDMI works, but only at 30Hz. According to [6] it should work at 60Hz. I'm no sure if this is a software or a hardware thing.

Considering an SSD upgrade I opened the device (here's a video of someone doing it: [7]). Prying it open required quite some force, especially around the serial port, but it wasn't complicated.


[1] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=100370&page=4#40
[2] https://www.dragonbox.de/en/mini-pcs...-running-linux
[3] https://packages.siduction.org/
[4] https://packages.debian.org/buster/equivs
[5] https://www.legitreviews.com/corsair...ive-review_784
[6] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-2-40-ghz.html
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjyNEKFwE4s